Russia: back to the future?

Dissenters in Vladimir Putin's Russia are not handled with kid gloves;
witness the truncheon-armed police who fell on a few hundred protesters
last weekend in Moscow and St. Petersburg. The brutalizing of peaceful
demonstrators dispells the last illusions that Russia can claim to be a
democracy.

The attacks on a dissident group, The Other Russia, showed the
centralization of power in Putin's hands. The Russian media have been
muzzled; the murder of muckraking reporter Anna Politkovskaya reminded
journalists of the price of criticizing the regime. If any of Russia's
new rich have designs on power, the example of the former owner of the
giant oil firm Yukos, jailed on corruption charges. confronts them.
Putin has also stripped the states of the power to elect their own
governors. But he remains popular. As he enters the final year of his
presidency, some fear that he wants to change the constitution to allow
him to run again.

Against this backdrop, The Other Russia has criticized Putin and the
government. They have a high-profile leader: former world chess
champion Garry Kasparov. He, too, was hauled off by police last
weekend.

Some journalists covering the mass arrests were jailed jailed for
providing "unobjective coverage."

Putin moves in the top circles of the world's leaders, but the
pretense that his government has any respect for free expression or the
rule of law is just that: a pretense.